Feasibility study to develop a blueberry harvester

Ongoing limitations in labour availability, combined with uncertainty of the impact of Brexit, are placing the UK soft fruit industry under unprecedented pressure. The sector needs over 30,000 migrant fruit pickers each year and growers are seeing this labour starting to disappear. This is despite increases in labour rates to attract workers and government assurances that they will work with the industry to help secure future labour availability. Given these issues it is clear that the industry needs to seek new ways to reduce its reliance on manual labour pools. This project therefore seeks to develop an automated machine to pick blueberries. Blueberries are now the second highest soft fruit sold in the UK by value (£337m sale p.a.). It is well suited to the UK climate but despite acreage expansion the UK only produces 7% of the marketable fruit sold in the UK. The market growth has outstripped acreage expansion. The UK expansion has now stopped due to labour uncertainty, in autumn 2017, as no workers could be sourced, up to 20% of the late Scottish crop were simply not picked. To address these concerns, this project is a feasibility study that seeks to develop a novel automated blueberry harvester. This uses pulsed pneumatics to remove fruit and with the air flow controlled by an image analysis system.